EXPERIENCING SOUNDS

For my blogpost I had to read two articles about sound. The first article is from Alexander (2015): Glen Gould and the Rhetoric of Sounds. The second article is from Careso (2014): (Re)Educating the Senses: Multimodal Listening, Bodily Learning, and the Composition of Sonic Experiences.

The article of Alexander (2015) is talking about working with sounds. Working with sounds (and manipulation them) is more accessible. The article refers to Gould, who is a pianist that manipulated voices. The possibilities of sounds recording and manipulation are important in this article. You can do more with sounds and voices than textual meaning making. The article of Alexander says: “in just such a world, in which students have the opportunity to manipulate, edit, and “splice” a variety of “text” in the pursuit of different kinds of expression and meaning-making” (p. 86). Those manipulations can be interesting and we should be more aware of the experience, understanding, articulation, and hearings from sounds and voices.

The main argument in Alexander’s article is that sounds and voices can be manipulated in ways that make the experience of sounds more intense and special.

The article of Careso (2014) is about the experience of sounds. Cereso says that most people only know about hearing through your ears. The article shows that hearing through your ears is not the only way to listen to sounds. Glennie is deaf and plays in a band and explains in the article how you can experience sounds with your body. Bodily listening gives more experiential knowledge about the mode of sounds (p. 108). You can ‘see’ and ‘touch’ the music. These ways of listening to music need a lot of practice and also unlearning of the hearing with your ears only.

The main argument in Careso’s article is that listening is not only possible with your ears, but the whole experience is making it possible to also ‘see’ and ‘touch’ the music.

There are some primary differences between the articles I have read. The article of Alexander refers to the way of making, publishing, and manipulating sounds, while the article of Careso talks more about the way of hearing you can hear and experience sounds.

The two articles have also an overlap between their arguments about the multimodality of sound. I think both articles talk about the way how you can experience listening to sounds, music and voices. The article of Alexander says that we have to be aware of what we “experience, understand, articulate, and hear” (p. 88) with sounds. The article of Careso talks also about the experience of sounds and says it can be experience by the multiple modes “it can be seen, hear, and felt.